From Syphon Filter to Uncharted: Sony Bend's Story

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The history of one of Sony's oldest first-party studios.

By Colin Moriarty

Since the release of the PlayStation more than 15 years ago, Sony has had an almost single-minded approach to first-party development: find a great studio, have that studio prove itself, and snatch it up. From Sucker Punch to Guerilla Games, Sony has established the most impressive first-party roster in gaming with this mindset.

One such company that Sony scooped up is Bend Studio, the Oregon-based production house behind the entirety of the Syphon Filter series. More recently, however, Bend Studio has been given the monumental task of taking PlayStation 3's most important franchise -- Uncharted -- and faithfully bringing it to the PlayStation Vita in the form of Uncharted: Golden Abyss. I recently got a chance to speak with the heads of Bend Studio, Creative Director John Garvin and Technical Director Chris Reese, to discuss the past, present and future of their studio.

The team at Sony Bend Studio.

John and Chris explained to me that the origins of Bend can actually be found in the now-defunct studio Infocom. Infocom developed Zork, one of the most important games early in the gaming industry's history. Two of Infocom's MIT-graduate founders, Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn, spun-off to begin working on games for the Apple Newton, Apple's first foray into the PDA space. The company was called Blank, Berlyn and Co., and the studio's initial directive was sports games.

But Blank, Berlyn and Co. wanted to do more. The heads "wanted to expand beyond the Newton... so that's when I was brought on," Chris Reese explained. And expand they did. The studio changed its name to Eidetic and began to pursue the expanding console market. Eidetic's first game was Bubsy 3D, a notorious flop on the PlayStation that Garvin and Reese were willing to candidly speak about.

Bubsy 3D was a flop. But an instructive flop.

"Bubsy was the first foray for the studio to get into the console," Reese said. "The PlayStation had introduced the capability of doing 3D... it was all the rage to do 3D, so that was sort of the transition... and it was a hard transition. There was a lot to figure out." And though Eidetic's first title was critically panned, Reese and Garvin note that some positives came out of Bubsy 3D's development. Bubsy had impressive draw distances for the time, and was running in a higher resolution than standard PlayStation games were. Moreover, it wasn't necessarily that Bubsy 3D was a bad game, as much as its contemporaries made it look behind-the-times.

"If you look at the context of when Bubsy came out, it was like the same time that Mario [64] had come out," Garvin told me. But there was a Bubsy-killer within the PlayStation family itself, and that was Naughty Dog's Crash Bandicoot. Garvin notes that the "downfall" of Bubsy was with Crash. "It did not have huge open vistas, it had very tight linear rail driven gameplay that looked beautiful. They had tons and tons of textures and lots of special effects and really great animations." Garvin ultimately admitted, "the Crash Bandicoot path sort of won, right?"